John Sununu: Obama Weakens US Militarily, Economically

The military and economic might of the United States has dramatically unraveled under the leadership of President Barack Obama, says John Sununu, chief of staff under President George H. W. Bush.

"We are now back to a point where the world was before Ronald Reagan built up our military defenses and really pressed [former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev to come to the table," Sununu told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

"Bush worked through a very complicated process to get the Soviet Union to back off and retreat from the occupation of the eastern countries in Europe and to create an attraction to them by virtue of the world economy that we allowed them to be a part of," Sununu said Tuesday.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, who last week dispatched his military into Ukraine, "regrets" all of those changes [and] wants a new Soviet Union, Sununu says.

"We have to understand that [Putin] will only respect a strong United States, strong militarily and strong economically. And we have a president that has gutted us in both places," he said.

"We have been gutted on our defense budget and we have been gutted in terms of growth. We have had no growth, really, since he became president."

Sununu, a former governor of New Hampshire and a surrogate to Mitt Romney during his presidential bid, says the liberal press ganged up on Romney during the campaign.

"Whatever Obama said, the relatively uninformed and frankly not too bright liberal press went along with, and now we have a world that's in trouble because the world has lost respect for the United States," Sununu said.

"Obama wanted to be loved; he didn't care about being respected, and, frankly, it's even worse than people realize because now Obama has pressed his Defense Department, the Department of Defense, to submit a budget which will gut even further our capacity to deal with difficulties around the world.

"He has no sense at all that this is not a world of tender love across every border. This is a world in which there are border differences, in which there are philosophy differences, in which there are religious differences, in which there are cultural differences."

Sununu says Obama's policies are "designed to unwind our spending obligations on defense and national security," which he can then funnel into his domestic agenda.

"That's what he's doing. And, yes, there is some method to his naivety, but beyond that, there is real naivety behind his naivety. He doesn't understand how dangerous it is to be so clever," he said.

Sununu also said the Affordable Care Act was a piece of legislation designed by Obama and the Democrats to "take money out of the pockets of everybody under 35."

"It was deliberately designed to scam them so that they would have to buy insurance and pay for healthcare for old goats like me. They were deliberately screwed by this piece of legislation, and we have to remind them that the hero that they voted for is tucking it to them every single day with Obamacare."